The titans are easily the best part of the game and definitely the most successfully implemented. Divided into distinct RPG-ish "classes" with individual loadouts and progression, I don't really have any problems here besides how weird and floaty melee attacks feel (tough to do in a normal FPS, I'd imagine it's much tougher with big robots) and the balance of some of them. Tone is the current bogeyman as she's very intuitive to use and her abilities fit together in a more complete way than most of the other titans, but it's not a catastrophic issue and truthfully just highlights how patchy some of the other titans' loadout designs are, particularly Northstar with her ultra niche™ tether mines and a core ability that is completely at odds with her playstyle and strengths and Ronin's hilarious vulnerability to melee attacks while his core is active, despite being the designated hand-to-hand fighter of the group. Other titans like Legion, Scorch, and Ion (once they fix vortex shield) have kits that largely complement their strengths and feel largely solid and well balanced, with Tone only standing out because of the degree to which her abilities feed into each other and aid her intended use. I would personally like to see a total reworking of Northstar's core ability and some hefty adjustments made to Ronin instead of nerfing Tone again, but since that's probably out of the cards at this point the best middle ground is a tweak to Tone's particle wall ability so that the cooldown only goes into effect once the shield is used up.
This weaponry of the game is tougher to meaningfully critique because so much of it depends on personal preference, as some weapons and tactics just click with certain players more than others while other, sometimes allegedly OP pieces of equipment are completely ignored. Case in point: the spitfire is pretty universally dismissed as one of the bottom three worst weapons in the game, but I do better with it than nearly any of the other weapons I've tried, which is all of them minus three or four. In my mind its pretty clearly got an edge over something like the devotion, even though the whole playerbase cries about the latter weapon. That said, I think that something can be done to bring the current top tier weapons down a bit to the rest of the arsenals level, those being the volt, the devotion, the alternator, and the car.
- Volt: Give this thing some recoil. It would still be a ridiculous laser beam but would hopefully be inferior to the assault rifles at long range.
- Devotion: Also needs some recoil, and that's all I'd be willing to change. No need to make it useless but it higher recoil would let it keep its niche as the rapid-fire LMG while making the spitfire preferable for long range fights.
- Alternator: More recoil would let this thing keep its close-range dominance while giving it an actual drawback.
- Car: This one actually feels fine, honestly.
As for the abilities and combos like devotion + amp wall, cloak, stim, etc., I think they're fine. They're all on reasonable cooldowns and offer something to do outside of the usual "pick an SMG and wallrun all over the place" strategy. I personally don't enjoy standing behind a wall and holding down the trigger, but more power to those that do.
I also have mixed feelings about the maps in this game. I like Eden the most, but even that one gets on my nerves sometimes, and the design of certain gems like Homestead and Drydock make me scratch my head in total confusion. There's a mix of urban sprawl and traditional CoD three-lane design here that I find difficult to come to grips with, and after forty hours I think I should be past this stage. Like I said, I'm not particularly competent at Titanfall 2 and frequently am amazed at both the ability of my opponents to track my fast-moving character model with such precision and my inability to pick that skill up. While I'm sure that I have a lot of gitting gud to do, I think the game definitely has room for improvement in the balance department.
No comments:
Post a Comment